Larry M. Hyman
Professor
phonological theory, African languages - especially Niger-Congo
Languages: African languages, especially Bantu and other Niger-Congo
Groups: Language & Historical Context, Phonetics, Phonology, & Morphology, Fieldwork & Language Documentation
Contact information
Email: hyman@berkeley.edu
Office phone: (510) 643-7619
Personal statement
Expanded Homepage
Ph.D., Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1972. Except for a two-year leave with a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (U.C. Berkeley, 1973-1975), he taught at the University of Southern California from 1971 to 1988. He came to Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1988, which he chaired from 1991 to 2002. He has worked extensively on phonological theory and other aspects of language structure — particularly as concerns the history and description of the Niger-Congo languages of Africa, especially Bantu. He has published several books (e.g. Phonology Theory and Analysis, A Theory of Phonological Weight) and numerous theoretical articles in such journals as Language, Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Phonology, Studies in African Linguistics and Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. His current interests center around phonological theory, tone systems, and the comparative and historical study of the Bantu language family (of about 500 languages) for which he founded the Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary (CBOLD), with funding from the National Science Foundation and in collaboration with the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CNRS/Université Lyon2). He also has had a grant from the France-Berkeley Fund and spent his 1995-96 sabbatical in the C.N.R.S. Laboratory “Dynamique du Langage” in Lyon, France.
Selected publications
“Universals in phonology”. To appear in The Linguistic Review, 2008.
“Tone: Is it different?” Submitted to The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Edition (John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu, eds).
“How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent”. Submitted to Language Sciences.
“Directional asymmetries in the morphology and phonology of words, with special reference to Bantu.” To appear in Linguistics 46.2 (2008).
"Affixation by place of articulation: the strange case of Tiene”. To appear in Proceedings of the Rara and Rarissima Conference, Leipzig.
"Is there a right-to-left bias in vowel harmony?” To appear in John R. Rennison, Friedrich Neubarth & Markus A. Pochtrager (eds), Phonologica 2002 (working title). Berlin: Mouton.
"Focus marking in Aghem: Syntax or semantics?” To appear in Laura Jo Downing & Sabine Zerbian, Focus in African Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
“Focus in Aghem”. To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Structure, Potsdam, June 6-8, 2006 (with Maria Polinsky).
"Kuki-Thaadow: an African tone system in Southeast Asia.” Submitted.
"Universals of tone rules: 30 years later”. In Tomas Riad & Carlos Gussenhoven (eds), Tones and tunes: Studies in word and sentence prosody, 1-34. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007.
John P. Daly & L. M. Hyman. "On the representation of tone in Peñoles Mixtec." International Journal of American Linguistics 73.165-208, 2007.
"Where’s phonology in typology?” Linguistic Typology 11.265-271, 2007.
"Niger-Congo verb extensions: Overview and discussion”. In Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña (eds), Selected Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 149-163. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2007.
"Elicitation as experimental phonology: Thlantlang Lai tonology”. In Maria-Josep Solé, Pam Beddor & Manjari Ohala (eds), Experimental Approaches to Phonology in Honor of John J. Ohala, 7-24. Oxford University Press, 2007.
“Word-prosodic typology”. Phonology 23.225-257, 2006.
“Why describe African languages?” In A. Akinlabi & O. Adesola (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th World Congress of African Linguistics, New Brunswick 2003, 21-42. Cologne: Ruediger Köppe Verlag, 2005.
"The word in Luganda.” In F.K. Erhard Voeltz (ed.), Studies in African linguistic typology, 171-193. John Benjamins (with Francis Katamba), 2005.